“I see children sitting on the floor begging for food,” a field worker tells me after returning from the mosque. “Parents say their children have not eaten all day. They have no roof, no certainty.”

This is not Afghanistan in 2001 or 2010. This is Afghanistan now.

The gendered toll of exclusion

Four years after the US withdrawal, Afghanistan has largely vanished from the American news cycle. But the crisis unfolding there has not paused. It has intensified quietly and dangerously with consequences that extend far beyond Afghan borders. 

According to the UN, 21.9 million Afghans, more than half the population, now require humanitarian assistance to survive. Hunger, displacement and poverty are widespread. Their effects are not evenly distributed. They fall most heavily on women and children.

Since August 2021, the Taliban has systematically removed women from public life. Girls are barred from secondary education. Women are prohibited from working with international aid organizations. That single decision forced major humanitarian agencies to suspend operations, freezing more than $46 million in assistance in 2022 alone. Clinics closed. Food deliveries stopped. Fragile communities collapsed.

For Washington, this is not just a moral failure. It is a strategic one. When women are excluded from aid delivery, humanitarian systems break down. When humanitarian systems fail, instability deepens. And when instability deepens in a country with a long history of transnational militancy, the risks do not remain local.

Afghanistan is once again becoming a place where desperation replaces governance and survival replaces social order. These are the conditions in which extremist networks recruit, operate and regenerate. The lesson of the past two decades should be clear. Prolonged collapse is not neutral. It is catalytic.

Climate stress and closing doors

Climate stress is accelerating this breakdown. Drought, water scarcity and agricultural failure have hollowed out rural livelihoods. Families live in tents. Children miss school because their parents cannot afford notebooks or pens. Girls beyond sixth grade are denied education, entirely wiping out future human capital in a country already stripped of opportunity.

At the same time, escape routes are closing. As of late 2025, the US has paused visa processing for Afghan nationals, including many who had previously been approved for resettlement. Pakistan has expelled more than a million Afghan families, forcing people back across the border only to sleep outdoors, sick, exposed and without medical care. This is the environment in which ABAAD: Afghan Women Forward operates, supporting women who have fallen through every remaining safety net.

Lives on the edge: stories of survival

Jamila lives in Kapisa with her three children and elderly father. Abandoned by her husband, she lacks the male sponsorship required to obtain a Taskira Afghanistan’s national identity document. Without it, her children cannot attend school or access health care. Instead, they work alongside her in dangerous agricultural labor. When winter comes, and the land fails, hunger follows.

Yashfa’s story shows how stigma becomes a permanent sentence. While a university student, she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was imprisoned for two years and gave birth in jail. Her daughter, Iman, was rejected by her father and labeled illegitimate. When women’s shelters were shut down, Yashfa and her child were forced back into an abusive household. Community members later attempted to kill Iman for dishonoring the family. ABAAD intervened, providing food documentation and securing Iman’s right to begin school. Survival here required constant negotiation, not protection by law.

Zahra’s family, in exchange for her 12-year-old daughter’s marriage, agreed for her husband’s remarriage to a second wife. She escaped to a shelter while pregnant. When shelters closed, she was pushed onto the streets with her children. Her son Aazar suffers from a life-threatening illness. ABAAD now provides housing, medical care and food, but her security remains fragile.

These are not isolated cases. Twenty-nine percent of Afghan women are married before 18. Ten percent before 15. There is no minimum legal age for marriage. As food insecurity worsens, families resort to desperate measures of child labor, forced marriage and, in extreme cases, selling children to settle debts or buy food.

This is how societies unravel.

Glimmers of hope amid collapse

And yet even amid collapse, there are points of light. One ABAAD student, Yasamin, recently gained admission to the University of Bologna after completing a language preparation program. Others are learning English, coding and digital skills tools that offer income and agency in an economy that has erased women’s formal participation.

For US policymakers, this distinction matters. Aid alone does not create stability. Survival without agency does not prevent radicalization. What Afghan women need is continuity, education skills and pathways to work that persist beyond news cycles and political fatigue.

As one ABAAD worker put it, daily life is now “a mix of pain, uncertainty and survival. Hope and security have been almost entirely removed. People feel imprisoned in a world without a future.” Afghanistan has not stabilized. It has been abandoned.

For the US, looking away is not neutrality. It is a strategic choice to allow long-term instability to harden in a region with proven capacity to export violence, insecurity and humanitarian shock. Forgotten crises do not stay contained. They metastasize.

Afghan women and children are not asking for pity.

They are asking not to be erased. And history shows that erasure always comes at a cost.

[For more information on ABAAD: Afghan Women Forward, please visit their website.]

[India Abroad first published a version of this piece.]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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